Revisiting Combat as Sport vs Combat as War

[Tvtyrant]

Those examples seem pretty biased to me. Combat As War implies to me that both sides are doing their utmost to win within the rules. Scry and Die is met with Glyphs, Symbols and other traps. Everything escalates as the DM and party try to one up each other.

Combat as Sport implies to me that the party and the DM agree combat is largely distinct from the setting, so they act within the settings' expectations of behavior. Maybe the Druid turns into a bird to scout, but the party doesn't Planar Bind the most detection free creature they can find to scout and then assassinate the enemies. The enemies hide in evil lairs instead of demiplanes, and don't use bomb strapped civilians as hostages wherever they go. It's an agreement that both sides will abide by setting expectations, basically. Swordfights using swords instead of ice assassins, or plague infected mice swarms, or whatever the particular metaweapon is.

Edit: Not that the former is metagaming per say. Just that there is always discrepancies between mechanics and setting, and finding the most mechanically efficient system will always veer somewhat from the setting. Harry Potter is a notorious example where the characters often look like idiots because they are supposed to look and act like anachonistic wizards, but their mechanics leads to semi-deific nested subspaces ala Doctor Who or Myst.